¡Solidaridad!

This could have been written about Holder and Fast & Furious; Hillary and Benghazi; Geithner and the fiscal cliff; Newtown and gun control; or... well, just about anything significant that has happened in the halls of Congress, really.

Our Congress [1] met in December. A diverse conglomeration of ages, social backgrounds, races and genders… but with a single political affiliation. More than six hundred people [2] who say they represent a nation, when in reality they only speak in the name of one ideology. The pantomime of plurality, with statistics designed to impress, given the number of women, youth, mixed-race or workers within it, but not with diversity of thought. A rainbow with seven bands of the same color...

The truth is, I no longer believe anything. Not the passive government [3], nor a secretary [4] who practices secrecy, nor the official journalists who were in that session of Congress [5] and didn’t report on the absence of such an important topic, nor a newspaper that only publishes when its silences are uncovered.

The author is not talking about any of those situations, though. Instead, it is a description of the government of Cuba, and the secrecy surrounding a new fiber optic cable between Cuba and Venezuela.

While it is nice to know that we Americans have something in common with the Cuban people, I find it depressing that our most immediately obvious common bond seems to be ingrained cynicism about the corruption of government.